e-khadem

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Stimulant medications affect arousal and reward, not attention networks

19 pointsby e-khadem7 miesięcy temu8 comments

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3 miesiące temudiscuss

There's a very narrow and vanishing window of opportunity left to end-up with anything other than a total disaster, and even in that case I'm not holding my breath for the quality of life for the next 5 years. In the long-term, it's harder to predict than either side wants to admit.

If you need a hint, just take a look at what this regime did in Syria (600k dead and 12 years of internal war), in Gaza and Palestine (75k dead), in Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and more. Most recently, this January in Iran with 40k dead. You see mullahs' footprints everywhere there is a humanitarian disaster, and I'm not optimistic about the future of Iran, in either case. These are not the kind of people that let go easily, they have a cataclysmic view of the world. They (literally) gave a "Passport to Heaven" to their fighters (Assad supporters) in Syria, and those very same fighters are chanting pro-regime songs (if you can even call it that) every night at every square and major street in the city.

As an Iranian, we saw these [death] figures as an abstract concept prior to these recent events. We (the ordinary citizens) heard about Yemen and the massacre in Syria, we "sympathized," and that was it. It wasn't until this January that it finally hit me, that 40k people dying is like 15 Tienanmen squares happening at once, or 5 times the D-Day battles casualties. And it's chilling to think about what the future will look like, knowing that this is only the beginning and we are choosing between "terrible" and "much worse."

3 miesiące temudiscuss

I do live in Iran.

3 miesiące temudiscuss

Let's put it this way: Have you seen someone's brain on the sidewalk lately? No? Lost a loved one / a friend / a classmate? Perhaps when people see this (as I have) they find more favorable views of the aerial bombing campaign.

For reference, it has been verfied [~] that the regime killed ~220 students just in the recent uprisings of this January. That's a whole school full of students, all under-18. And then you have to ask, why would a teenager be on the streets, given that they knew, everyone knew, that snipers and machine guns will be there? Just 5 days ago they hung an 18-year-old who was arrested this Jan. They also hung a 19-yo wrestling champion very recently. The collateral damage of these bombings, which must be denounced and is reprehensible, still has not reached these levels either in brutality and in number. [1]

[~] (my internet connection is not good enough to find the sources, I'm using dnstt in a very unreliable network)

[1] AFAIK, Around 180-190 students have died in the recent conflict. Some 160-170 was due to an erroneous airstrike by the US military on the first day of the war, and their school was within 30 meters of a military base (!). Furthermore, some of the other students who have died were the children of the assassinated regime officials.

3 miesiące temudiscuss

Because almost all of the people inside Iran have been disconnected for the past 35 days [1]. And believe it or not, they are texting these news live to all mobile phones on a daily basis as well. Some regime supporters believe it, because the want to believe it, they need to believe it. Just in the past 24 hours I have received 5 different messages from different organizations claiming victory and damage to US / Israel assets.

Just for a quick laugh, look at the official (Iranian) president's letter to the American people published yesterday [2]. The font changes between the paragraphs!

[1] https://mastodon.social/@netblocks/116339631989805542

[2] https://x.com/drpezeshkian/status/2039418009052119190?s=20

3 miesiące temudiscuss

The claim being addressed is a shootdown over Qeshm island, which is the biggest island just west of the strait of Hormuz. The current CSAR operations are happening somewhere in the Khuzestan province. Probably somewhere within the 150 km radius of [1] based on online footage of the C-130 flying over.

[1] 31.941606, 50.311765

4 miesiące temudiscuss

That will be the dominating term eventually. But the initial sharp temperature drop is mostly due to the coffee mug being at room temperature and having a ~significant mass.

5 miesięcy temudiscuss

I have an opinion, because I was there and saw it with my own eyes. Because my friends and family members died.

5 miesięcy temudiscuss

[citation needed]. Not really though, you're just spewing the regime's propaganda. You might as well directly quote Khamenei on this one. I'm really restraining myself by not swearing at this comment.

Have you seen a dead body in your life? Have you seen a street stained with blood being washed with high pressure water? Have you seen parts of the brain of a fellow citizen on the sidewalk, the same guy who was standing next to you 30 seconds ago? 36'000 people were killed in just two nights. It was like 5 battles of D-Day, but in a shorter amount of time.

And you are conveniently forgetting the fact that most of the people came out when Reza Pahlavi requested a mass protest.

And then you portray it as if the people had no agency in this, they didn't know that 1500 were killed in the 2019 protests. And a similar number in 2022-2023 over Mahsa Amini, for protesting the actions of the "ethics police" killing a young girl over a few strands of her hair.

In the end, everyone is responsible for this other than the actual tyrants running the régime and the blood thirsty mullahs doing the actual killing.

5 miesięcy temudiscuss

> The Iranian woman told me that very few people in Iran actually read the book. It's very long, and hard to grasp for untrained readers.

She makes a fair point. Reading and fully understanding Shahnameh is not straightforward. The difficulty does not primarily stem from drastic linguistic change, although the language has evolved and been somewhat simplified over time, but rather from the nature of Persian poetry itself, which is often deliberately layered and intricate *.

That said, Iranian students are introduced to selected passages and stories from Shahnameh throughout their schooling. Teachers typically devote considerable time to these texts, as the work is closely tied to cultural identity and a sense of historical pride.

* Persian, in particular, is often described as highly suited to poetic expression. Its flexible grammar and word order allow for a degree of intentional ambiguity, and this interpretive openness is frequently regarded as a mark of sophistication (difficult to master at a high-level for a layperson). A single ghazal by Hafez, for instance, can be read as a dialogue with God, a beloved man, or a beloved woman, with each interpretation leading to a different emotional and philosophical resonance. This multiplicity is the core part of the artistry.

Personally, I did not truly understand Hafez until I fell in love for the first time. My vocabulary and historical knowledge remained the same, yet my experience of the poetry changed completely. What shifted was something more inward and spiritual and only then did I begin to feel the full force of the verses.

For example, consider the following (unfortunately) translated lines:

  O cupbearer, pass the cup around and offer it to me --
  For love seemed easy at first, but then the difficulties began.

The Persian word corresponding to "cupbearer" may be read as a bar servant, a human beloved, a spiritual guide, or even the divine itself. The "wine" may signify literal intoxication, romantic love, mystical ecstasy, or divine knowledge. Nothing in the grammar forces a single interpretation, the poem invites the reader's inner state to complete it (and at the same time makes it rhyme).

5 miesięcy temudiscuss

People read Shahname[1] regularly in Iran, and it was written at around 1000 CE, but there isn't much before 900 CE that is comprehensible to a modern day Persian speaker.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahnameh

The Shahnameh is a long epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between c. 977 and 1010 CE and is the national epic of Greater Iran. Shahnameh is one of the world's longest epic poems, and the longest epic poem created by a single author.

5 miesięcy temudiscuss

I think not adding new features frequently and keeping everything stable and working in the long-term is also meritorious. Vim is the same on my local machine, on my rpi, and on an Ubuntu 20.04 VM that I use for some proprietary software.

Also, I cannot think of an extension / new feature that makes sense as a part of Vim (if I want something more, I want a lot more. I don't want Vim to do a lot more, for the sake of simplicity and conformity, that's a job for vscode with Vim extension).

At the same time I wouldn't object to someone adding features to this program. But they have to try really hard to convince me to start relying on that feature (I wouldn't, because I would miss it on Ubuntu 20.04 and I will forget how I used to work without that feature).

I tried nvim a few years ago and honestly didn't find anything advantageous there. But since I had `:sh` in muscle memory and it was a bit (very?) different there I gave up on nvim.

5 miesięcy temudiscuss

Yes, I have a Casio fx-9750GIII and I love it. I still haven't found an Android app or website that can do everything that I need (basic functionality), but in general:

- I need physical buttons. I often find that on touchscreens I mistype something and I don't notice.

- The history feature. Maybe I want to do a serial task or calculation, and I can just replace/correct one of the formulas in the history and it automatically recalculates all of the expressions that came after it.

- I have written some micropython code / utilities for the calculator and I use it all the time.

- I don't want to context switch to do a quick calculation. On my PC I have to open up a new terminal or a website (I might be offline, so I have to hotspot and then connect the wifi and ...) and interrupt my existing work or I have to frequently switch between a PDF or latex or whatever that I'm working on.

- Typing out `sin` or `np.sin` or `sin^-1` on PC is both longer and more error prone. It gets very frustrating very quickly.

- The numerical solver is a godsend. Try solving for the roots of an expression like `xe^x = 10` on your PC without internet. Or with an android application. On my calculator it's just a few dedicated button presses. On the PC, I have to use isympy and typeout `nsolve(Eq(x * exp(x), 10), 1)`, and you wouldn't even get a proper graphical display of the expression while you are typing it.

6 miesięcy temudiscuss

FOCI papers[1] are great IMO, but some of submissions are just an academic curiosity, not a practical solution that works for the average Joe at a low cost and scale. For practical methods that are heavily used, you can take a look at popular opensource implementations and their documentation. Sing-box, Xray core, hiddify (their patches on top of xray and singbox), shadowsocks and shadowtls, and many more. ShadowTLS provides a good starting point with a fairly detailed documentation and clearly describes the development process.

The way that I see it, its not just a technical problem anymore. It's about making the methods as diverse as possible and to some extent messing up the network for everyone. In other words, we should increase the cost and the collateral damage of widespread censorship. As an anecdotal data point, the network was quite tightly controlled / monitored around 2023 in Iran and nothing worked reliably. Eventually people (ab)used the network (for example the tls fragments method) to the extent that most of the useful and unrelated websites (e.g., anything behind cloudflare, most of the Hetzner IPv4 addresses, and more) stopped working or were blocked. This was an unacceptably high collateral damage for the censors (?), so they "eased" some of the restrictions. Vless and Trojan were the same at that time and didn't work or were blocked very quickly, but they started working ~reliably again until very recently.

[1] https://www.petsymposium.org/foci/

6 miesięcy temudiscuss

Lol. That was _before_ these new restrictions. And don't assume that you could setup a simple wireguard server and be done with it. No, it had to be a proper low fingerprint method (e.g., you had to hide the tls-in-tls timing pattern and do traffic shaping). Now, something like dnstt sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. You may be able to open gmail in 10 minutes if it does, and you explicitly have to block the fonts.

6 miesięcy temudiscuss

> Willing to completely give up domestic control of your energy sector in exchange for this regime change?

You're saying this as if they (the people) had any control before.

A military intervention should always be the last resort. Two examples of military intervention / occupation working out in the long run are Germany and Japan in WW2. Maybe even South Korea (stabilization of a dictatorship and economic development lead to a democratic revolution later). One can be hopeful that this starts a better chapter for the Venezuelians as well.

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

Safety is a valid concern in general. But avoidance not the right way to approach it. Democratizing the access to such tools (and developing a somewhat open ecosystem around it) for researchers and the general public is the better way IMO. This way people with more knowledge (not necessarily technical. For example philosophers) can experiment and explore this space more and guide the development going forward.

Also, the base assumption of every prospering society is a population that cares about and values their freedom and rights. If the society drifts towards becoming averse to learning about these virtues ... well, there will be consequences (and yes, we are going this way. For example look at the current state of politics, wealth distribution, and labor rights in the US. People would have been a lot more resentful to this in the 1960s or 70s.)

The same is true about AI systems. If the general public (or at least a good percentage of the researchers) study it well enough, they will force this alignment with true human values. Contrary to this, censorship or less equitable / harder access and later evaluation is really detrimental to this process (more sophisticated and hazardous models will be developed without any feedback from the intellectuals / the society. Then those misaligned models can cause a lot of harm in the hands of a rogue actor).

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

Afghanistan [1]. Most Syrians ended up in Europe I assume.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghans_in_Iran

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

Of course. Like embezzlement. I live in Iran and if you want a more detailed picture of the situation I find data provided in [1] well-researched. The executive summary is that one of the military branches really doesn't care about the environment as long as they get more power / money / anti-US proxies.

Also, that "Tehran will run out of water in two weeks" statement came from the president, and some neighborhoods really don't have water for several hours each day. The official advice is to "install water pumps and storage tanks."

[1] Why Iran is Rapidly Dying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8kSGH4I8Ps

8 miesięcy temudiscuss

Usually this is not the main problem that people run into. Most often we take basics of terminal usage and config management for granted, and these are the hardest parts for new comers to learn, because they often don't know the conventions and the unwritten laws of the typical config file format, and once they get a weird error due to for example a non-existent config file or insufficient permissions and they search the exact error message, they get lost in deep, unrelated technical discussions of more obscure problems that real sys-admins encounter. They don't know that they should search for the basics, and along with weird cryptic error messages they can easily get stuck on a trivial tasks for hours ...

The other day I handed my Arch laptop to a friend (a mechanical engineer) who liked tinkering with computers, had a few papers on $RECENT_AI_TOPICS, and was considering moving to arch to learn Linux. I advised him to start with Ubuntu and then move to arch, but he insisted so I gave him a quick test.

Since he was more or less comfortable with reading manuals and searching, I asked him to install nginx on my laptop and change the configs to listen on 8080. He eventually succeeded ... after 70 minutes or so. He installed nginx and started the service pretty easily in a couple of minutes, but then he got stuck on editing the config files. First, he wasn't familiar with the terminal file editors so he had to learn one (he chose vim and went through vimtutor) and then he opened the config file without sudo, so he couldn't save the file. Then he thought that maybe he needed to stop nginx first but that didn't work. And then he started reading nginx manuals and tutorials and SE threads for like 30 minutes. Finally he decided to search the vim error directly and then found the issue.

I have often heard similar stories, and I think the main hurdle for most people is not "the hard part" or RTFM, but it's "the unwritten part" and the conventions.

9 miesięcy temudiscuss

If this works for you, then great, do it as long as it works. But for me this will never work. What actually has worked though, is being in an enjoyable environment (surrounded by friends and family, lab / hobby equipment, quality books and poetry, or just spending a couple of hours outside) that can grab my attention better than those social media apps. Also, I regularly delete and recreate my social media accounts.

Additionally, a very effective way of becoming less attached to the phone is to occasionally "forget" to bring it out with you, but that only works if you for example don't need maps or aren't expected to take a phone call. The key-point here is the irregularity, because then over time you will get used to replacing smartphone usage with some other joyful (or idle) activities instead of just moving the dopamine rush hour around. Furthermore I believe that embracing boredom is a must, and I just accept that sometimes I will be bored with nothing to do for a couple of hours and that's when I get most creative.